Visual Effects Industry Takes Protest to Twitter, Facebook

Visual-effects workers and supporters are changing their profile pictures to a green rectangle, representing the green-screen technique used in video production to remove the background and replace it with visual effects.

Visual effects artists, increasingly frustrated by what they believe are deteriorating work conditions at movie studios, are taking their dissent online.

Hundreds of VFX-artists protested in Hollywood at the Academy Awards last month following the recent bankruptcy filing by the effects company behind Ang Lee’s Oscar winner “Life of Pi.”

Now VFX workers and supporters are taking to Facebook and Twitter, changing their profile pictures to a green rectangle, representing the green-screen technique used in video production and post-production to remove the background and replace it with visual effects. The online movement, dubbed the “Piece of the Pi Protest,” is aimed at recognizing the struggles of many VFX-firms.

One group on Facebook, the VFX Solidarity International, has accrued about 70,000 “likes” on its page. The group says it unites VFX professionals and the digital artist community “for sound international business standards and practices” and was created amid the recent “crisis” within the VFX community.

Effects artists are responsible for the thousands of effects shots that appear in most of today’s blockbuster movies. Despite rocketing demand for visual effects in commercials, movies and games, creating the effects is getting increasingly unprofitable, industry executives say. While there are plenty of jobs out there, margins are often razor thin, and production companies protect their margins by keeping compensation to subcontractors low.

The bankruptcy of Rhythm & Hues is the second bankruptcy filing by a leading U.S. visual effects shop in the past six months, following Digital Domain Media Group Inc. in September last year.

Niklas Jacobson, a co-founder of Swedish effects studio Important Looking Pirates AB, is one of many VFX-artists that changed his Facebook profile picture to a green rectangle. Most of his colleagues at work followed his example. What drove Mr. Jacobson to change his profile picture was a desire to raise awareness about what he thinks is an overlooked part of the movie industry.

“The most profitable movies in history are all VFX-based and our work ensures that production companies can earn billions of dollars,” he said. “Yet VFX-artists are often in the bottom of the closing credits, below stuff like catering.”

ILP made the visual effects for Norwegian smash-hit movie Kon-Tiki, which tells the story about adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s famous expedition across the Pacific Ocean in 1947 on a raft out of balsa logs. Kon-Tiki has broken all box office records in its home country, and was one of this year’s Oscar nominees for best foreign movie.

With its almost 30 employees, ILP is a relatively low-cost company compared with the massive California-based studios. And yet, while having no trouble filling its order book with fancy projects, the company faces a cost challenge.

“We are fully booked and we have loads of work. Still, it’s hard for us to improve profitability. It’s a complex situation and the market is over saturated. I’m the first one to admit that the industry is partly to blame for the situation we’re in, and that we need to become more efficient. I’m not just out here asking for more money,” Mr. Jacobson said.